photoblog/posts/watermarking-or-how-to-destroy-your-work.rst

.. title: Watermarking or how to destroy your work
.. slug: watermarking-or-how-to-destroy-your-work
.. date: 2014-10-09 06:58:10 UTC+02:00
.. tags: watermarking, distribution
.. link:
.. description: Watermarking or how to destroy your work
.. type: text
.. author: Alexandre Dulaunoy

.. _tag: https://www.flickr.com/photos/adulau/14994494530/ 
.. figure:: /posts/tag.jpg
   :alt: Ma soif de savoir est...

   Ma soif de savoir est..., ƒ/2.5, 50mm, tag_ on flickr

While visiting a recent photo-club exhibition, I saw watermarking on a
vast majority of the printed art works presented. This is really
disturbing not only for your eyes but also the concept itself of adding
some text on top of your work.

While asking the members of the photo-club, they told me this is
recommended practise to "protect" their work. I think "protect"
in their view means limiting the distribution of their picture.
Indeed, when you look at a picture with a watermark below 
distracts your view, your mind and then, it's just distracting
from seeing the picture. So you tend to move away from the watermarked
pictures and concentrate on the pictures without watermark. At the end,
I was more interested in the work of someone having an interesting
set of negative-space pictures without any distracting marks or tags.

Then one member of the photo-club told me that everyone was really
attracted by those minimalist pictures. Indeed the pictures were nice
and well done but I think the factor of water-marks for the other
pictures is not to under estimate. People focus on the pictures
who attract their eyes (and their brain), this is very human. If you add
some complementary factors, your work is less accessible and by so you'll
get less potential viewers. Especially adding water-marking on art works in an exhibition
doesn't make sense.

For watermarked images on Internet, it's exactly the same. People tend to
move away from the watermarked images. If they search for an image or a topic
in an image search engine, they will see a whole list of pictures. They won't
select/click on the ones having a clear message for them and not the ones
with random text on top of the images.

If you are afraid of someone use or reuse your work, the best is to publish
your work. The more your work is known and attributed to you, the more you protect
your work. The watermarking basically does the opposite, limiting the distribution
and especially the possibility to reinforce the attribution to your work. The more
viewers you have, the more potential attributions you might have.

My work is freely licensed under the CC-BY-SA license (or even the GNU GPL license)
and the non-visible watermarking is in the meta-data (EXIF).

I don't like watermarks, what about you?